Stephen King's The Dark Tower: A Pre-Movie Primer

The Preamble

I wrote a little bit about the Dark Tower movie quite some time ago now, and I think I’ve at least thought of posting in response to various different announcements (the Wizard and Glass show announcement in particular), but just haven’t gotten around to it.

However, I’ve now been asked about the series a couple of times, as people in my book club are just starting it or are reading it in preparation for the movie, and so I thought I’d write my own Dark Tower primer post which avoids spoilers more than the other stuff that I’ve written about the series, aimed at addressing questions like, “should you read the books?” and “should you see the movie?”  If you want to read something that is substantially more than a primer, I will point you toward Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance by Robin Furth. This is a six hundred page reference book about the series that will probably end up on my bookshelf eventually, but which I haven’t read yet.

Here’s a reminder that when I reviewed the overall series I ranked the books thus, from best to worst:

1. The Gunslinger (Book 1)
   
2. The Waste Lands (Book 3)
   
3. The Drawing of the Three (Book 2)
   
4. Wolves of the Calla (Book 5)
   
5. The Dark Tower (Book 7)
   
6. Wizard and Glass (Book 4)
   
7. Song of Susannah (Book 6)

My complete Dark Tower (re)read is now four years behind me, but if forced I would probably place The Wind Through the Keyhole (Book 4.5) on that ranked list between Wizard and Glass and Song of Susannah, not because it was bad, but because it wasn’t very memorable.  The Little Sisters of Eluria (Book 0.5, more of a novella) would go just below that, because I remember it being boring but it did have a few very memorable images.

So, I count myself as a Stephen King fan, but I acknowledge that he has some serious faults as a writer and also has written some garbage.  When you write as much as he does, of course not all of it will be good.  I came to the Dark Tower early in my King reading, mostly because I read Firestarter first and I wasn’t into horror yet (I’m not sure whether I even qualify as being “into it” now) so I was too scared to try any of his more famous works.  I don’t know what year it was when I first read The Gunslinger but I’m sure I was in high school, and it made a big impression.  I was already getting sick of epic fantasy, and the Dark Tower series represented something that had that epic feeling and some of those same tropes, but was blessedly different.

What is the Dark Tower series?

The Dark Tower is Stephen King’s magnum opus, but I don’t think I’d call it his masterpiece (I haven’t read enough of his other novels yet to make that call—“only” 24, including the Dark Tower books and three that he co-authored). It is the story of Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, who is on a journey to the Dark Tower, a destination whose significance is not immediately clear to the reader (and is perhaps a bit of a MacGuffin).  Roland is a towering main character, enigmatic and magnificent. He carries a pair of huge guns that he doesn't hesitate to use. Over the course of the series, he is joined by various characters of varying quality, but his journey to the Tower is paramount. The genre is a mix of western, post-apocalypse, portal fantasy, science fiction, and road novel, with a bit of biblical imagery thrown in for good measure.

It begins with one of the greatest opening lines in the history of literature:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

It's awesome.

It's also pretty wacky.  Eventually, the series becomes self-referential to various other works in King’s vast oeuvre, and what started out as the story of a knightly figure, the last of his kind, pursuing a goal over a vast distance of time and space for mysterious reasons, turns into something much more complex. References creep in from other cultural touchstones as well, some more organically than others.

Basically, if you have any expectations whatsoever about the Dark Tower, you should abandon them immediately.

Should you read the Dark Tower series?

Short Answer: The whole series is available for your reading pleasure. If you start with The Gunslinger and stop when you get bored, there'll be no harm done.

It should be evident by now that I'm a big fan of the series, however I hesitate to recommend it without several words of caution.

The first thing to note is that the series is very unlike King's other work. There are King fans who dislike The Dark Tower and others who have only read The Dark Tower. That being said, a passing familiarity with King's work is beneficial but not essential on a hypothetical reader's journey to the Dark Tower. Knowledge of other King works means you might recognize a few more of the references he's making to them as the series progresses. It also might ease your discomfort with some of the weirder places that the series goes if you're already familiar with some of King's favourite themes and writing tics.

Next, know that there are basically two halves of the series, separated by the prequel novel, Wizard and Glass, that comes smack dab in the middle. The Gunslinger is my favourite book in the series partly because King evidently didn't know where he was going (he's what's called a "discovery writer" and doesn't plan ahead of time, which is kind of a problem with a multi-book series) and the cracks don't show yet in the first book. I suspect that King wrote the prequel novel when he did because he had no idea where to go after The Waste Lands, but that's just a theory of mine.

Anyway, the series was begun with a short story in the late 1970s, and Wizard and Glass, the wheel-spinning prequel novel, was published in 1997. The first three books are my favourites. They have a grander feel than the second half of the series, which suffers from the essential task of having to wrap up all the nonsense that the first half could just present without comment.

Also, in 1999, Stephen King was struck by a van while he was out walking, and was very seriously injured and also became extremely motivated to finish The Dark Tower. The last three books were published within one year of each other, which is a feat of epic proportions but the cracks show, and they are large. I would have to reread the series more carefully to confirm this, but I believe that the majority of the self-referenced material appears in these later books, and they set up the meta-narrative themes that become very important at the end of the series.

Overall, I think the series is worth it, but I wouldn't recommend pushing through if the early books don't interest you. It's a series that peaks early, so although I didn't hate the last three books or the ending of the series, I did find them disappointing, and you might as well.

Should you see the Dark Tower movie?

Short Answer: I'm not sure.

First you should watch this trailer.



I have a lot of thoughts about this:

• The gun stuff looks great.
  
• Matthew McConaughey looks perfect.
  
• I am so upset that the gunslinger is costumed the way he is: it doesn't make sense to call your villain The Man in Black when your hero is also wearing all black. Get some denim on this man somewhere.
  
• Also I think Idris Elba should be using his own accent. Roland is not from our world and therefore doesn't need to sound like an American, which I think is what they're going for here but it's hard to tell.
  
• The scene where Jake tells Roland that he'll like the modern world? Yuck.
  
• Etc.

I honestly haven't decided yet whether I'm going to see the movie, but I'm definitely going to wait and see what the reviews are before I go. I don't have a huge amount of faith in the creative team behind this (and when I say "creative team" I mostly mean "screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman"). I'm very jaded about adaptations lately. Also, ever since the Harry Potter movies managed to totally supersede my mental images of the books, I've been hesitant to see adaptations of things I really love.

Given that I'm so unsure about all this, I can hardly recommend that anyone else rush out to see The Dark Tower. On the other hand, if you think that trailer looks awesome, go ahead!

Do you need to read the books before seeing the movie?

Short Answer: Of course not.

Beyond the fact that I have no dog in the book-before-movie fight (or even in the book versus movie fight—I simply don't care anymore), it's hard to say whether a knowledge of the books would be helpful or necessary when the movie hasn't been released yet.

Before I get into the next bit, a warning that you should exercise caution when reading any of the many articles about how The Dark Tower film is actually a sequel to the series (the linked one very clearly identifies spoilers, but be careful anyway!).

The fact that the film is a sequel to the books is something that I find reassuring, I have to admit. If you are confused as to how there can be a sequel to a series that is finished, just trust me and don't think too hard about it. Just know I think this is the best possible route they could've taken to adapt the Dark Tower series. It means that you can't expect the movie to directly follow the events in the books (but also simultaneously need to have read the books to understand why that makes sense).

If they do a halfway competent job with this adaptation, you shouldn't need to have a familiarity with the source material. That is literally the point of an adaptation. That being said, I suspect that having read the series would add an extra layer of enjoyment (or perhaps frustration).

- - -

So I'm now pushing the 2000 word mark with this post and I'm going to wrap it up. I hope at least a few of those words were helpful to you!

If you've read The Dark Tower, I'd love to hear your opinions on all of this. And if you haven't read it, I'd love to hear whether you think you'll read the books, see the movie, or do both!

The Dark Tower on the Big Screen

Up to now I admit I've done an indifferent job of writing about film and tv adaptations of books that I've reviewed, although I've got plans to watch some older ones eventually and write about them. Maybe even sooner rather than later. When I posted about The Magicians being on tv, I mentioned that I basically didn't care, except that I recently found out that Arjun Gupta is on the show (playing Penny!), and I think he's a major hottie, so maybe I'll give it a try after all.

Anyway, this post is about the recent announcement that the movie adaptation of Stephen King's Dark Tower is happening after all, starring Idris Elba as The Gunslinger, and Matthew McConaughey as The Man in Black. I'm not sure I think Idris Elba is as perfect for the role as everyone says he is (although he does seem to have the right mix of dignity and menace about him), but that's not what I'm here to complain about today.

Instead, I'm reacting to the details in this article. There will probably be some spoilers and I'm going to assume some level of familiarity with the material, although I'll try to clarify where I can.

"The movie will take place 'in our day, in the modern world'"

Does that mean that the entire thing will take place in our world, and that there's somehow no Mid-World? How does that work? The books bounce between our world and the others pretty liberally, and it makes sense to bring some of those scenes up to modern times (especially in the later books, more on that in a sec). But setting the movie in our world alone would require significant changes that might actually alter the source material beyond recognition*.

"The movie's plot will actually pick up in the middle of the story"

I can only assume that this means they'll start with Wolves of the Calla, for the following reasons:

• The actual middle book in the series is Wizard and Glass, and unless they can magically age Idris Elba down to John Boyega (who proved he can also do dignity+menace in Attack the Block, and ideally they'd go with an even younger actor) using CGI, they are obviously not starting with Wizard and Glass;
  
• I'm not sure what else you'd call the middle of the story, because the first three books are all rising action;
  
• Mostly just those two things.

This is a huge problem for reasons that I don't think I even need to state to anyone familiar with the source material, but for everyone else: after Wizard and Glass, the series takes a more or less noticeable dive in quality, depending on how critical you are. As far as I'm concerned all of the best stuff in The Dark Tower series happens in the first three books, with honourable mention to the witch in Wizard and Glass. More importantly, though, the books get weird, and I have no idea how the casual moviegoer will swallow most of what happens in the last three books of the series without being primed by the first three books, and even then it would be a hard sell.

Characters from other Stephen King books (besides The Man in Black) show up. Stephen King himself shows up. The man who nearly killed Stephen King with his vehicle shows up. The accident in which a man nearly killed Stephen King with his vehicle shows up. Susannah has an accelerated pregnancy and eventually gives birth via, let's just say, a number of complications, to a weird demon baby. There is a ton of travel between different dimensions. There are lightsabres and golden snitches. This is without getting into the Crimson King and the Tower and the Rose and God knows what else.

The Dark Tower isn't your run of the mill, straightforward, Game of Thrones-style fantasy epic. It is Stephen King's epic, and that makes all the difference. It's not something you pick up halfway through and catch up as you go along.

The movie I might actually want to watch 

I'd watch an adaptation of The Gunslinger for sure, especially an adaptation that restores some of Roland's sharper edges and moral ambiguity that King shaved off in the expurgated edition (sitting on my shelf). While the plot can tend to meander a bit, that would allow cuts for a more cohesive and contained story that wouldn't make the action completely bewildering to people who aren't familiar with the source material. I suspect other people would also be more prepared to show up for a post-apocalypse fantasy Western than a post-apocalypse fantasy Western parallel universe road trip.

Despite my general dislike of Wizard and Glass, I'd also happily show up to see an adaptation of that. This would allow the filmmakers to capitalize on the current YA film trend and, again, it's a relatively self-contained narrative that wouldn't be overly bewildering to a casual audience. I'm positive that a group of charismatic young actors could overcome virtually every problem that I had with this novel, and getting the witch, Rhea, on screen would give me everything that I wanted and didn't quite get from The Witch.

Just maybe, the whole series could be a tv show instead of a movie. I feel like the work as a whole isn't really adaptable at all, though, to be honest. The early going is so good and then it just descends into half-baked madness. And I say this as someone who really likes the series!

*On the other hand, maybe significant changes to the source material are the whole point. There's more than a little room to improve upon the original, but there's no way that the serial numbers could be convincingly filed off, so instead they might just make something that's informed by the Dark Tower books but doesn't stay faithful to them. I'm more ok with that prospect than I would be with a clumsy attempt to bring the last three books to the screen in a way that's accurate but so abridged that they no longer make any sense. Either way, I won't be seeing The Dark Tower film at all until I see some reviews.

NB: Since initially writing this, I've come across at least one article speculating that the film will actually begin with The Drawing of the Three. I think that's a bad idea, too.

R33. The Dark Tower (series) by Stephen King

Year Published: 1982-2012
Pages: 4548

First Sentence: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Review:
I'm really going to spoil things now, so you might want to skip this post if the other stuff I've said about The Dark Tower has somehow convinced you to read it despite being hopelessly vague.

Anyway, before I say anything else, I'll say that King did eventually get a bit carried away with made up words (not to mention some colourful dialogue). Ka is fine (and how could it be otherwise?), but when you start getting into dan-tetes and an-tetes and taheen, things start to fall apart.

That's minor, though. More important to my impressions of the series as a whole is the issue I already mentioned in my last post regarding the Gunslinger not ending up where he belonged. King began the series as a very young man and ended it in a rush as an older one who'd very recently had his life flash before his eyes. It's a shame that things had to work out that way, but I'm not even sure the young man could've finished what he started, and I'm not sure the older man ever would have finished at all if not for having his life threatened. Between the conclusion King was able to write and no conclusion at all, I'll take the former.

And now I'll rank the books, if you wouldn't mind. I'll start at the bottom, just like I did with The List.

6 - Song of Susannah

King isn't exactly great when it comes to race (to be clear: nor am I, so I'm not going to attempt an in depth discussion of this). He has his fair share of magical black men and I'm not sure how to feel about some parts of Bag of Bones. But you've got to give him credit for making one of the main characters of his magnum opus a mentally ill, physically disabled black woman, the titular Susannah. Never mind that the series is lily white otherwise, besides the vampires and low men and creatures with animal heads and human bodies a la Minotaur. Anyway. This book was my least favourite mostly due to the fact that it functions almost solely as place setting for The Dark Tower. Almost nothing of note happens in this book, the characters are mostly just moved into place (literally into the times and spaces where they'll be when The Dark Tower begins).

- - - - -

Except for a hundred thousand voices singing in rough harmony, those were the only sounds.

- - - - -

4 - Wizard and Glass

This would be a controversial spot for this book, if I had enough readers for controversy. It's many people's favourite in the series. I found that the romance between Roland and Susan was overblown and nowhere near as epic as it was supposed to be. The witch Rhea was a standout part of the book though, and child Roland was a wonderful thing to see. I just wish it had been tighter, because I got bored in the middle.

- - - - -

Roland decided he'd had enough tea and hypocrisy for one morning.

- - - - -

7 - The Dark Tower

This one is above 4 mostly due to the fact that in spite of everything, I was at least never bored. There's more to be found in my review. I didn't cry when Eddie died, but I teared up for Jake and Oy's exits from the series. (I didn't cry for Susan either.) Also: Mordred's a-hungry. King also gives the guy who hit him with a van (and later died under other circumstances) an extremely dubious cameo. I have less of a problem with King's presence in the series than this guy's, who presumably didn't give his permission for it.

5 - Wolves of the Calla

Twins and kidnappings and robots, oh my! This book was really energetic compared to 4. I was extremely curious throughout to find out the origin of the Wolves and Roland's plan for dealing with them.

- - - - -

"I do not apologize for my beliefs," he said, "but if I have complicated your work here in the Calla, I'm sorry."
   "Your Man Jesus seems to me a bit of a son of a bitch when it comes to women," Roland said. "Was He ever married?"
   The corners of Callahan's mouth quirked. "No," he said, "but His girlfriend was a whore."
   "Well," Roland said, "that's a start."

- - - - -

2 - The Drawing of the Three

Roland on a beach, dying with a junkie and a crazy lady. This book is basically just building directly on events at the end of The Gunslinger. It's got shooting and drugs in it. Or rather, to be more specific, Roland crosses through into what appears to be our world, to recruit Eddie, a heroin addict, and Odetta/Detta, a divided woman in several ways, to his cause.

3 - The Waste Lands

This book has all the coolest shit in it. The enormous robot/cyborg bear Shardik, the train, Blaine, who is a pain and also probably the creepiest thing in the entire series. Jake's resurrection through a monster house. Lots of good stuff.

1 - The Gunslinger

The series peaked early. This is the book where King had the loosest handle on the Gunslinger and the world he was crossing, and consequently it's the best book, unburdened by anything that had come before. It's where he captures the atmosphere most effectively. It's clear that there's more to follow, and the connections with "our" world, which would eventually get King into trouble, are present from the very beginning, but I'd say that this book read alone would make for the most satisfying starting and stopping point.

And that's almost all I have to say about that. Just one final point…

SPOILER!!! for the very end

To briefly address the very end, I don't have any major problems with it. I don't know what King's intention was in sending Roland back to the beginning but the more I think about it, the more symbolic it is of the nature of fiction and imagination itself. Ka is the writer, but it's also his imagination and the function of story. Given a different set of ideas or circumstances, King may have written an entirely different series, one he was more or less satisfied with. Could Roland's story be told perfectly? I don't know.

R33. The Dark Tower (series): The Dark Tower by Stephen King

Year Published: 2004
Pages: 1031

First Sentence: Pere Don Callahan had once been the Catholic priest of a town, 'Salem's Lot had been its name, that no longer existed on any map.

Review:
For a spoiler-free review of The Gunslinger, look here, and for a spoiler-free recommendation on the series, read the following sentence. King doesn't manage to finish what he started in the early books, but if you allow him that, it's still an enjoyable ride.

On to the review proper.

To begin, The Dark Tower is quite long. It's not really the length that its 1030 pages imply—the font is biggish and the pages small, and the prose zips with characteristic Stephen King speed. Still, although I often forget what was going on at the beginning of a book by the time I reach the end, I was astonished to realize everything that happened in this one as I flipped backwards through it.

In my review of The Gunslinger, I called that book an introduction but didn't mention that it's also a collection of parts rather than a real whole. This book is the same sort of thing, basically just a whole bunch of set pieces strung along the road to The Tower. I suspect that many road novels have that characteristic. If I remembered more about Augie March, this would be a good time for a comparison. This might also be a symptom of what I'm going to call Late-Series Decay, wherein a book that comes late in a series simply loses its ability to function as a self-contained narrative without summarizing all the books that came before.

Nevertheless, the Gunslinger, Roland, is still a wonderful romantic character. I'm not sure King's really done him justice over the full course of the series but he got a Crowning Moment of Awesome (verbum sapienti, that link will take you to TV Tropes) toward the end of the book that wrung a couple of tears out of my eyes. This may not be the novel that Roland was journeying toward at the end of The Gunslinger, but it's the one he ended up in. There are a lot of other well-realized characters as well, and what I forgot to mention earlier about the set pieces is that many of them are very exciting.

Because it's hard to structure a review of a series (Late Series Review Decay?), I'm going to end this review here and finish up the discussion in my post about the overall series.

- - - - -

"You could help me by shutting up," Eddie said, and the grill spoke no more. He found himself wondering if he had offended it, then wondered if perhaps he should kill himself and spare the world a problem.

- - - - -

R33. The Dark Tower (series): The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Year Published: 1982
Pages: 300

First Sentence: The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

Review:
I'm planning to read one of the Dark Tower books per month this year*, but in the interest of not turning this into I Love Stephen King: The Blog, I'm only going to review the first and last books in the series, plus a little round up of the whole thing at the end.

So let's begin.

Longer term readers may remember me mentioning this series in my posts about series that I haven't finished reading yet. The Gunslinger is actually a reread, that I picked up for the first time about a decade ago, in its unrevised form (Roland shot first). The edition that I own now (because I Love Stephen King) is a revised edition, but my memory wasn't clear enough to pick out the differences that, according to King's introduction, are pretty minor.

And now with all that out of the way… The Gunslinger is the beginning of the story of Roland Deschain, or at least our introduction to his story. He's the last of a proud tradition of gunslingers from an Old West-flavoured Camelot in a world that has "moved on." He is, for the bulk of the book, chasing a mysterious man in black across an immense desert.

King's strength is, as usual, in characters and atmosphere. He likes men being manly a little bit too much, but his characters are just wonderful basically. The world that Roland comes from and the one he travels through are puzzling and well-realized (if still rather faintly sketched at this point), full of magical creatures and rusty machines.

The Gunslinger doesn't have much in the way of plot, I have to admit. It's more of a long introduction to what will come after, except that I don't think King had any idea at all what that might be at the time of writing.

I'll have more to say way down the road when I finish the seventh book, hopefully in July sometime**. In the meantime, I can say that this is a series worth starting.

* Um, 2013 that is.

** Um, December 2013 that is.

- - - - -

"Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met in a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. And within in, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top, gunslinger? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a Room?…
   "You dare not."
   And in the gunslinger's mind, those worlds echoed: You dare not.

VI

"Someone has dared," the gunslinger said.
   "Who would that be?"
   "God," the gunslinger said softly. His eyes gleamed. "God has dared… or the king you spoke of… or… is the room empty, seer?"
   "I don't know." Fear passed over the man in black's bland face, as soft and dark as a buzzard's wing. "And, furthermore, I don't ask. It might be unwise."

- - - - -